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Uh-oh! Another Standing IndyCar Start?!

Indycar.com reports (ultra-deep sourcing on this story, huh?) that the Saturday race in Toronto will begin with an F-1 style standing start. In the little noticed and often scoffed at view of this author, standing starts in IndyCar are overly pretentious and needlessly destructive. Have they succeeded in pulling a single one of these off properly yet? In all of their attempts, which date back to last year? Arguably the one in Houston a few weeks back was incident free, although Rahal still stalled his car toward the back of the field, as your humble author seems to recall through his beery haze. Any such bobble at the start of a stationary field revving up to a buck fifty or so in a few seconds can be catastrophic, or worse.

In this writer’s warped opinion these slow, accident prone beginnings are antithetical to IndyCar racing and serve only to invite disaster. See the inaugural Indy Grand Prix and Saavedra’s stall from the pole for one recent horrific example.

Indy Grand Prix standing start, 2014. espn.com photo

Indycars are about speed and passing, not being stopped and then banging into each other before ever crossing start/finish to take the green flag. That’s some other series in some southern city. The entire massive IndyRaceReviewer staff was scientifically polled in a hitherto top secret double-blind survey recently. In a unanimous vote they screamed (with more than a tinge of French revolutionary fervor) and in unison “Drop the standing starts!”

However, one’s mind should rarely, if ever (unless it be on the utmost crucial matters in life, such as favorite ice cream flavor or not hogging the passing lane on the interstate) be set in stone. So, we here at IndyRaceReviewer humbly submit the question to YOU, the Indycar loving public, in our first officially sanctioned and extremely expensive poll of our beloved readers.

Standing starts – yea or nay? If you’re a supporter, then pray tell why? What is the appeal of them? Let’s see those comments, people! We’re only two days away from another potential Armageddon!